Whose woods these are I think I know

Koldo Serra's BACKWOODS (whose original title, BOSQUE DE SOMBRAS, translates as "Forest of Shadows") is set in 1978, well before the advent of cell phones and GPS navigation, when most people didn't think twice about putting themselves beyond reach.

Sure, it's a bald-faced riff on Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1971) but it's also a simpler, less provocative, less bullying story about human confrontation, about prejudice and ignorance, about suspicion and fear, about curiosity and the elusive specter of self-knowledge. Set in northern Spain's Basque region, the film concerns an idyllic Iberian getaway by two edgy London couples... older businessman (and half-Spaniard) Paul (Gary Oldman) and his Latin wife Isabel (THE MACHINIST's Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), and Paul's former partner Norman (Paddy Considine) and his pretty French wife, Lucy (Virginie Ledoyen, from Claude Chabrol's LA CEREMONIE), whose migraine headaches betray some obvious domestic discord festering between them. It's a potentially explosive combination even before Paul and Norman go a-hunting and stumble upon a feral girl (Yaiza Esteve) kept shackled in a tumbledown forest shack... and resolve, consequences be damned, to do the right thing.

While this set-up feels at first rote and over-trammeled, BACKWOODS distinguishes itself by the respect it shows for its characters. This is not to say these people don't misbehave, that they don't act from stupidity or superstition or disregard for their fellow humans, but rather that Serra and writing partner Jon Sagalá have provided the mounting tragedy with a tenable context that allows the viewer to appreciate both sides of the conflict between the worldly Haves and the backward Have-Nots (led by Lluís Homar, from Pedro Almodóvar's BAD EDUCATION). Most surprising is the character played by Gary Oldman. While he has the potential to be an abrasive A-type personality (Oldman has played more than his share of them), one senses that Paul's return to his roots signals a reconsideration of his life choices up to present, a midlife embracing of first principles and primary motivations.

Supporting this reading are the themes of marriage, fidelity and family that haunt the film, with the vague romantic complaints of the English-speaking couples contrasting sharply with the Catholic traditions embodied (if imprecisely honored) by the Navarrese. The discovery of the congenitally deformed child (whose fused fingers suggests Apert's syndrome) divides the protagonists against themselves but serves to bring these neurotic urbanites back to themselves, even if the resultant reflection leaves them horrified by what they see. While Serra refuses to condescend to the grotesque or to even fully demonize his ostensible villains, neither does he fully redeem his fallible protagonists, allowing them to remain true to themselves 'til the bitter end.

BACKWOODS was shot in Navarra, Spain, the same neck of the woods where Orson Welles filmed CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965) and Álex de la Iglesia shot THE DAY OF THE BEAST (1995). It's a forbidding yet resolutely beautiful region with a history of having resisted foreign intervention, which lends some credence to the film's backstory of xenophobia, inbreeding and religious shame. Behind the camera was the talented Unax Mendía, who also shot Eugenio Mira's THE BIRTHDAY (2004) and Antonio Hernández's OCULTO (aka HIDDEN, 2005). The production is entirely free of the kind of kinetic postproduction jiggery pokery employed these days to keep audiences on edge. That the events unfold classically and rather calmly does not in any way mitigate the weight of the ensuing tragedy.

With Spain exporting some well-regarded horror product these days (THE ORPHANAGE, [REC]), BACKWOODS is likely to get lost in the rental DVD shuffle, being neither true horror or particularly graphic in the depiction of its violence (even though almost all of it is committed with shotguns, at close range). The action is marred somewhat by one contrived scene of rape, by one dodgy makeup effect on the part of the feral child, and by an all too spot-on use of Leonard Cohen's "There Is A War"as a harbinger of conflict. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my time with BACKWOODS and I'll be curious to see what Koldo Serra does next.